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Thursday, 10 October 2013

Where did September go?

September has done a very neat trick of disappearing on me :)

I know I was there, but alas, I just can't remember!

In fact, it was a very important month in this house, as our little man began primary school and we had a very smooth transition from pre-school to full time education. He is doing well and seems to be enjoying his days, learning rhymes and practising his writing skills. Even homework is now becoming a smoother operation as we sneakily get it out of the way before his big sister comes home, so that he can get back to the important stuff, like lego & transformers, while herself pores over her maths book.

I bought this cool cardboard playhouse in Aldi last week, to try to encourage some 'fun' colouring as homework had kind of ruined it's appeal for the little man. As soon as I wake up in the morning, all I hear is the soft 'scribble, scribble' sound of twistables and markers doing their thing. Best ten euro I ever spent! And not a battery in sight :)

In October I celebrated my 11th wedding anniversary with my wonderful hubby. We had no plans and no babysitter, so celebrations are temporarily on hold. Nobody tells you that over a decade can roll past in a nano second, but we are happy and I hope to see a few more decades roll pleasantly past.

Our Cake Topper :)

With all the excitement I have still managed to fit in a few rows here and there. I am currently working on Sharon Miller's Cora Shawl with Jamieson's Ultra, which is a very cuddly, soft and prettily coloured yarn selection. I chose Iceberg for the main body of the shawl with stripes of Navy, Strawberry Crush, Azure and Mint Julep. I'm halfway through the stripes and enjoying it immensely. I have knit this particular shawl once already when I first started this knitting adventure but my tension was tight and I never checked it so the shawl turned out smaller than the 68" I was promised. That always disappointed me as I wanted something blanket like to snuggle under, so I am happy now to rectify the situation and I'm using a bigger needle size (3.5mm).

The pattern is beautiful, as is the yarn, though taking photo's and trying to capture the pretty turned out to be a mammoth task that I failed miserably at. Take it from me and not the photo's, this shawl is gorgeous to look at and wear.

The nupps did nearly have me in a home for the bewildered though, even the thought of them now make me shudder involuntarily (for the uninitiated, nupps are little bobble type instruments of torture that are made over two rows of knitting, usually resulting in broken needles, split yarn, dropped stitches and worse still, the fear of dropped stitches). My nerves were frayed and my wonderful hubby said I was 'making the face' again, the face he usually tries to hide from :(

No more nupps for a while so...

I have put aside my Princess and Williamson Shawls for the moment and I have one sleeve to complete on my Westerwick Cardigan, so I will hopefully have a new post coming very shortly.

3 comments:

Did you know that Estonians make bobbles in lots of ways? The gal I took a class from said she imagined that the little old ladies gathered together and plotted out that they would teach Nancy Bush the very hardest one. :)

Hi I found your blog over ravelry :-) and now I'm searching here to see your wonderful projects.

I can see that you are a tight knitter. To save your nerves by knitting noops try to do them with double yarn overs. Drop the second yarn over before you knit all those stitches together. Ok this is time consuming because you have to put the stitches on the right needle to drop the yarn overs and bring them back to left needle to knit them together.

If I do so I knit the purl stitch and the next purl very tight to pull the noops to front.

But dropped stitches are more time consuming :-)

And this method is the best way to knit noops "loosely" for tight knitters, because they looks great if they are a not to tight as the others stitches.

I would like to say: thanks for sharing your great inspirations here and I hope you can understand my meanings and if it is possible to read between the lines, because my knitting knowledge is much better than my english language knowledge :-)

Thank you Monika, that makes perfect sense, I will try this next time! I do love the finished object, but they are quite time consuming and make me cranky when I have to do a lot of them! Thank you so much for taking the time to look through my blog and I hope you find it interesting :)